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WAP stands for Wireless Access Protocol, a general term used to describe the multi-layered protocol and related technologies that bring Internet content to mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones. Such devices are referred to as thin clients because they have one or more constraints in the form of display, input, memory, CPU, or other hardware or usability limitations. The platform constraints and the slower (and more expensive) bandwidth of cellular and related networks make standard Internet protocols difficult to utilize. Using the growing set of WAP tools and protocols, however, the mobile Internet is quite a capable tool.

As previously stated, WAP refers to a wide range of technologies and protocols, all related to mobile Internet functionality. This functionality has roots dating back to the mid 1990s. At that time, several vendors were working on the mobile Internet problem as mobile device sales skyrocketed, and several competing technologies emerged * Nokia's Narrow Band Sockets (NBS) and Tagged Text Markup Language (TTML) * Ericsson's Intelligent Terminal Transfer Protocol (ITTP) * Unwired Planet's Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) Each technology had its own purpose, but some overlapped with others in various areas. This diversity threatened to fragment the wireless industry along provider lines. In mid 1997, the WAP Forum was founded to aid in communication among the developers and to spur a common set of protocols and technologies. In the same year, the industry took another step forward with the formation of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), which combined several distinct development and standards bodies into one.

There is a lot of talk going around about WAP and how it will bring the WWW to your cellphone. New cellphone models are launched every other day, boasting of WAP capabilities. To start off, let us look into the limitations of a cellphone--very low processor power, miniscule amount of RAM, a massive crunch of screen size and miniscule data speeds of 9600 bits per second. These ensured that a cellphone can't handle the typical amount of content and graphics on a website. To overcome these difficulties, a group of wireless companies, led by Nokia, came together to develop WAP. WAP is made up of four parts -- Wireless Application Environment (WAE), Wireless Session Protocol , Wireless Transport Protocol and the Wireless Layer Transport Security . While WAE is the only part that is visible to the user, the other three work in the background to enable the transfer of contents from the website (WAP enabled) to the user. On the user side, a WAP-enabled cellphone has a microbrowser, a stripped-down version of the normal browser, capable of displaying pages coded in WML. WML, short for Wireless Markup Language, is a variant of HTML, that includes pure text and hyperlinks, with no graphics. The WML code is generated by WAE. n the backend, the three other components of WAP play a critical role. The Wireless Session Protocol establishes and closes the connection with the WAP-enabled website. The Wireless Transfer Protocol ensures that the data packets reaches the designated point while the Wireless Layer Transport Security, a subset of SSL, compresses and encrypts the data sent from your device. When your cellpnone connects to wireless network and requests a website (the site should be WAP-enabled) the request passes through the nearest cell site, where it is routed to a gateway server. The gateway server converts the request to standard HTTP format and sends it to the website. The site responds to the request and sends the requested content, as HTML documents to the gateway server. The gateway server converts this data into WML and sends it to your device, via the relevant cell site, where the microbrowser displays the page. Since the WML can accomodate only a part of the HTML the developer has to stick to recommended specifications on their site to make it WAP enabled.